Anything important should be kept inside the file. Filesystem metadata gets lost all the time, isn't consistent between operating systems, zipping up a folder and extracting it will probably mess up timestampts too.
Apple's Migration Assistant messed up timestamps when I did a M2 > M4 copy recently.
Dropbox doesn't seem to keep timestamps properly either.
I like using filesystem timestamps to sort through things in Finder, and thankfully I like A Better Finder Attributes for being able to batch copy EXIF data into timestamps.
Anything important should be kept inside the file. Filesystem metadata gets lost all the time, isn't consistent between operating systems, zipping up a folder and extracting it will probably mess up timestampts too.